Are Mites Having Sex on my Face? The Question You May Not Want to Know the Answer to

Sept. 22, 2014 - Microscopic mites are having sex on your face, and researchers from North Carolina State University
are eager to study them. The "Meet Your Mites" program is collecting
samples from ordinary citizens to learn more about the life cycle of these microscopic creatures that live on all human adults.

ROBB DUNN, BIOLOGIST & WRITER, NORTH CAROLINA STATE
UNIVERSITY:In general on our skin we have thousands of species. And so we’ve studied a lot about the bacteria
that live on our skin, fungi live on our skin, worms live on your skin. We all have those things.

Mites are going into hair follicles and into the pores. There could be hundreds of thousands, or even
millions in an individual person. We
don’t really know. We know that
sometimes they appear to come out and mate on your skin.

The mites have sex on your head, right? So that’s happening . It’s probably happening right now, you know,
with you, uh, with everybody who’s watching.
And so they do have this funny way of living on you that I think we find
totally gross if we talk about it, you know.
And yet independent of our comfort with these realities, these mites do
tons of different things.

And so figuring that
story out I think will show us a ton, not just about them, but about
mammals. And it’s just wide open. And for the most part for now we could just
sample people and figure out what they have.

MEAGAN THOEMMES, GRADUATE STUDENT, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
“Your Wildlife” is a citizen-science outreach
initiative. And so the “Meet Your Mites”
project is an extension of “Your Wildlife.”
The project is really unique in the fact that we get to engage the
participants personally. So they get to
learn about their mites, what’s living directly on them at the time of the
sampling. And then we get to learn about
the things that are so closely tied to our bodies that we know very little
about.

Face mites are these tiny arthropods. They’re microscopic and they actually live
all around your body. They seem to be
really concentrated on your face. And
they were originally collected from foreheads so they got coined that even
though they could live in a lot of other areas.

DAN FERGUS, MICROBIOLOGIST, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY:
The life cycle of the mites is about 14 days. And it’s thought that the females, once they
choose a pore, more or less stay in that pore.
And the males roam around a little bit.

So they live about five days as adults, going around mating
on your face at night. They idea is the
female comes to the surface of the pore, a male is searching around for a mate,
finds her, they mate at the opening of the pore. The female goes back down in and will live
the rest of her life down there laying eggs
and eating your sebum. And the
male will go off and find another pore, maybe another mate or another place to
just hang out.

They don’t have an anus so they’re not really pooping. The idea has been put out there that they may
explode. We’ve looked at a lot of mites
and we’ve never seen an engorged mite about to explode.

ROBB DUNN, BIOLOGIST & WRITER, NORTH CAROLINA STATE
UNIVERSITY:
It’s a bad way to go but you gotta go some way.

By looking at those mites we can figure out stories about
ourselves and that would be a really neat thing because they evolve super
rapidly.

MEAGAN THOEMMES,
GRADUATE STUDENT, NORTH CAROLINA STATE
UNIVERSITY:
So one of the main goals of this study is that we are trying
to get a lot of mites from different populations of people around the world
because we are really interested in mapping the genetic history of these mites.

So we can use the relationships that we find in these mites
populations to determine not only how they are related to each other
but we could use that to determine how we’re related to each other and how we
spread around the world and how human moved through time.

It’s very exciting to know there’s a tiny arthropod that’s
associated with every person on the planet.

Are Mites Having Sex on my Face? The Question You May Not Want to Know the Answer to

Sept. 22, 2014 - Microscopic mites are having sex on your face, and researchers from North Carolina State University
are eager to study them. The "Meet Your Mites" program is collecting
samples from ordinary citizens to learn more about the life cycle of these microscopic creatures that live on all human adults.